1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to image processing, especially to an image processing device, a video subsystem and a video pipeline.
2. Description of Related Art
As the design and manufacturing process of integrated circuits move on, more and more functions that used to be carried out by separated devices are integrated into one electronic device such as a smart phone, a tablet personal computer, etc. The photographic function (a.k.a. image/video capturing and encoding function), which might be the most popular one, is usually included in a multifunctional electronic device. However, since a multifunctional electronic device generally has one and only one application processor dealing with a lot of setting and control of different functions executed by software and/or hardware, the photographic function often has to wait for the response from the application processor after sending one or more interrupt(s) or request(s) to the application processor, which may degrade the performance of the photographic function, consume too much resources of the application processor and reduce user experience.
People who are interested in the related art may refer to the following documents:    (1) Report of EETimes, “Mobile video: ARM vs. DSP vs. hardware”, published on http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc jd=1275550.    (2) US patent, “Integrated camera image signal processor and video encoder”, U.S. Pat. No. 7,859,574 B1.    (3) US patent, “Motion picture encoding device and method, motion picture decoding device and method, motion picture recording device, program, and data structure”, U.S. Pat. No. 8,699,569 B2.